Ground Tours is a temporary exhibition comprising a series of audiovisual works made across three stormwater drain grills and an accompanying poster series. Activating the below‑ground waterways that course and trickle through the Parkville campus, the project engages these flows as acoustic corridors for conversation, listening and vocalisation. It was developed in dialogue with The Grand Tour, an exhibition of selected etchings gifted to the University collection by Terence (Terry) Lane OAM (1946–2024) and presented at the Noel Shaw Gallery, Baillieu Library, University of Melbourne, July 2025–June 2026. Placed in relation to The Grand Tour, Ground Tours turns attention to the local, and the submerged.
The work weaves together sonic exchanges, filmic reflections and ground frottages drawn from mobile phone video, audio field recordings and drawings made while sitting with, lying down and conversing along a series of drains that run along the western edge of the University Oval. By bringing our place‑based responses into proximity with the collection, we aim to reorient touring as a practice of situated, relational engagement with water and ground that registers the entangled infrastructures and ecologies beneath our feet. In Ground Tours, glass screens, obsidian-like surfaces of mobile phones and camera lenses, and frottage echo and unsettle representational devices such as the Claude glass, early photography, and etching that shaped the Grand Tour’s sublime narratives and established its aesthetic distance and framing conventions.
We gratefully acknowledge the invitation, extensive conversations and support of Priya Namana, Academic Outreach Officer and Sally Foster, Curator, Prints and Drawings, Archives and Special Collections, Student and Scholarly Services.
This project has been undertaken with the support of the academic and research contexts provided by Monash University, RMIT University and Adelaide University.
Images: Christo Crocker (installation) & Lisa Radford (panel discussion)
